Google's AI Search Optimisation Guide:
The Short Version
Google has finally published official guidance on how to appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and future AI-powered search experiences. The biggest takeaway?
AI optimisation is still SEO.
Despite new terms like AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), Google says its AI features rely on the same core ranking systems that power traditional search.
What Matters Most
1. Create Original Content
Google’s AI systems favour content that offers:
- First-hand experience
- Unique opinions or insights
- Original research and data
- Real-world expertise
Simply rewriting information that already exists online is unlikely to stand out.
2. Focus on People, Not AI
Don’t create hundreds of pages targeting every possible AI query variation.
Google specifically warns against producing large volumes of content purely to influence AI-generated answers. Instead, create content that genuinely helps your audience.
3. Technical SEO Still Matters
To appear in AI-generated search results, your content must:
- Be crawlable
- Be indexed
- Meet Google’s technical SEO requirements
- Deliver a good user experience
If Google can’t properly access your content, AI features can’t use it either.
4. Use Images and Video
Google’s AI experiences don’t just surface web pages.
High-quality images, videos, product information and local business data can all be featured, creating additional visibility opportunities.
5. Keep Local and Product Data Accurate
For ecommerce and local businesses:
- Maintain accurate product feeds
- Expand and enrich your feed with the new attributes available (see our article on feed optimisation for the best AI Search results)
- Keep local business information up to date on Maps/ Google my Business
- Use structured data where appropriate
AI search increasingly pulls this information directly into responses.
What You Don’t Need To Do
Google explicitly dismisses many of the “AI SEO hacks” currently being sold, including:
- Special AI-only content formats
- Separate GEO/AEO strategies
- llms.txt files
- Content chunking for AI
- AI-specific schema markup
Google’s message is simple: good SEO remains good AI optimisation.
The Real Opportunity
As AI answers become more common, generic content becomes less valuable.
The winners will be businesses that publish content AI cannot easily reproduce:
- Case studies
- Customer results
- Proprietary data
- Expert opinions
- First-hand experience
In a world of AI-generated summaries, unique expertise becomes your biggest competitive advantage.
One interesting omission from Google’s guide is that it focuses almost entirely on your own website. It says very little about the growing importance of third-party mentions, reviews, Reddit discussions, industry publications and brand citations, which many studies suggest are increasingly influential in AI search systems beyond Google itself.
